The Project

We Are On A Mission To Capture Awesome Portraits

Simply put, we have joined forces to create a collection of images that depict the unique personalities and stories behind individuals born on each day of the calendar year. Join uson this journey and be part of it.

Everyone is unique in their own right, and our goal and job as photographers is to capture and preserve this uniqueness. Your life, your experiences, your thoughts and your emotions are what define you and make you, you. Our mission is to photograph 366 individuals around the world to represent each of the 366 days of the year (Yeah, February 29 included!).

The project will attempt to represent the individuals through their raw and natural beauty, as well as their surroundings and livelihoods. We want to collect images and stories that will help us get a better understanding of what birthdays mean for individuals from both a personal and a cultural perspective while allowing collaborators to create images that in turn depict their own perspectives of the world.

To bring Canadian photographers together and create a body of work that represents the unique personalities of individuals and celebrates differences, cultures and traditions surrounding birthday memories and celebrations.

We want to encourage collaboration and give photographers an opportunity to showcase their talent by coming together as a community and collaborating on a project that brings to light the uniqueness of individuals around the world.

The concept for this project was born from a book by Gary Goldschneider called The Secret Language of Birthdays. In this book the author compiled information from over 40 years of empirical research to describe individuals through an assessment of the day and month of their birth. We want to do the same, but through images.

We believe in the diversity and talent of the photographic community in Canada and we want to nurture our “in-house” photographers. This project is a way to put a spotlight on Canadian photographers.

A Few Words

For many years I’ve contemplated the idea of doing photography projects like “365” but I was never able to commit for some reason. Mid summer in 2014, after much pondering, I decided it was time to pursue something different, and challenging. It was important to me that the project revolved around collaboration with other photographers; it was also important that it supported the Canadian photographic community, so I started my mission to find enough photographers that believed in my idea and wanted to join me. And then The Birthday Book Project was born.

I have always been fascinated by people. Having arrived in Canada about 11 years ago from Brazil, the multiculturalism and diversity shocked me. But in a good way. Looking back, I believe I grew up in a bubble, knowing too little about the “outside world” and being too quick to generalize things based on ignorance. Coming to Canada forced me to educate myself and opened my perspectives to the world outside the bubble.

I am excited about this project and I believe that it can be so much more than just a collection of portraits. I want to share our journey through our blog and document not only the portraits but the interactions, the stories and the memories that come about from this experience and in consequence, hopefully encourage, empower and inspire others around the world.

Camila Gargantini

Project Breakdown

Our project will work in phases:

After launch in January 2015, we will be reaching out to find as many people as we can to be photographed for the project.

We will concurrently schedule meeting times between the subjects and collaborators so that the pictures can be taken.

We will also be sharing the images, the stories and everything in between through our blog.